5.3 - Hotfix 1

[Lord Caedus]

When connections/bases/systems change, economy gets re-calculated automatically. With the way the economy formula for HRCs works, it favors longer distances (the sweet spot is about 20-25 minutes of travel time). This means that in general when travel time increases, profits go up. For this specific example of Copper to Gallia, or any other location that would have used the Barrier Pass last month, profit of hauling went up, not down. Worst case, if the haul is too long, you can log off half way through, continue next time, and still have more CSU overall.


If the connection remained stable, it would kill off any potential of Copper as an HRC into Gallia, and instead of POB owners complaining we'd get regular traders complaining that the profits got cut. If we left it as it was in 5.2, people would complain that reaching Coronado from ex. Tau-23 takes too long to respond to or start player interaction. Whichever way you choose, someone will complain and someone will be better off. In this specific example, how much worse is a player who owns a POB in Champagne? In 5.2 the route would have been Coronado -> Baffin -> Tau-29 -> Tau-23 -> Languedoc -> Ile-de-France -> Champagne. Now, the route is Coronado -> Cortez -> Manchester -> Newcastle -> Tau-31 -> Tau-23 -> Languedoc -> Ile-de-France -> Champagne. 6 systems versus 8. Is it longer travel time? Absolutely. Is it that much worse, that the travel time increased 2x, 3x, or more? No. It is a 2 system difference, with a higher % of the route being trade lanes due to the Bretonian path.

This change only revealed the actual issue, an underlaying one with economy: balancing POB recipes. Some location are superior to others when it comes to overall POB potential and versatility to make equipment. The best examples of this are systems like Omega-3, or Rheinland having an advantage in 5.2 due to the Ablatives being so prevalent in so many recipes. The actual solution to getting the POBs in Gallia be more competitive with the rest is to do a rebalance of POB equipment recipes, something the economy team is already planning to do. They haven't managed to finish it in time for 5.3, but hopefully it will come in the near future.

I'm sorry but the logic here is faulty in the first place because nobody would actually be taking Copper to Champagne. It's never been the ideal place to sell any HRC in Gallia, purely because of how much further away Burgundy is. Just flying from roughly the center of Tau-23 to the far side of Burgundy alone already accounts for half of your ideal flight time of 20-25 minutes, and that route is almost exclusively on trade lanes.

As you mentioned this is mainly evidence of POB recipes being terribly implemented, but at the same time we would need more comprehensive economic routes for Gallia anyway, because almost every HRC produced in Gallia is sold in a place that makes them economically unviable to trade back to an HRC origin point (or anywhere near one). Cigars, Cryocubes and Holotainment Bands are the three most viable HRCs to haul back to Coronado, and the pricing on them there is awful. This is the case for Platinum and Gold (both kinds) as well, so it's not purely a Copper issue.

If we're being forced to sit on our hands because we're waiting on Econ changes to be rolled through than this should've been communicated in the original patch notes. Something along the lines of "We understand that the economy changes for 5.3 are not fully implemented at this time, and ask that the playerbase be patient as we attempt to roll these changes out as soon as possible" would've done a lot to alleviate the rhetoric we've been seeing above.

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